How To Easily Add More Revenue Streams To Your Business

Investing lots of time and money into building new streams of revenue can be scary. Here’s how to do it while removing the risk.

Some Highlights:

Anton had a nice conversation with a long-time Drop Ship Lifestyle customer wanting to begin to private label their products, but they haven't pulled the trigger (fear of risk).

A great way to add a revenue stream is by adding an additional value to your current product (think a subscription box for meats if you are selling grills).

Look for other companies that are offering the service you want to do. See which ones have an affiliate program and order from the top three. See which one you like the best and gives the most value in your opinion.

Once you find out which one you want, join their affiliate program and promote it on your website. At this moment you have only really added a few links and have not needed to research farms and packaging and any of those other details.

After a few months, look at the data. If it is working well, reach out to this company to work out a deal where they can be the packer / supplier for your private label. Then, if it works, switch out their product links on your website with your new label.

This took away all the research you would have had to do in order to create your own private label as you have already built a relationship with a professional, you already know the product and have created another arm of revenue for your company.

Side note....Look out for Mastermind Meet-ups for eCommerce Lifestyle. Anton wants to bring 10 - 30 entrepreneurs together, share all their inside information and numbers with each other. If you are interested in being a part of it, stay tuned on eCommerceLifestyle.com for more details.

Hey, what's up, everybody? Anton Kraly here from eCommerceLifestyle.com. Welcome to another episode of the eCommerce Lifestyle podcast. Right now, I am just heading in, going to the office on a pretty nice Monday morning out here in Texas. I was thinking about a email exchange that I had over the weekend and a message that, good to have as a takeaway from that, that I want to share with the person that I was emailing back and forth with and with you as well because it could probably benefit you, depending on where you're at in life and in business.

So, the person, I'm not going to call them out by name. But the person that I was speaking with is a member of my Drop Ship Lifestyle coaching program. You can find that at DropShipLifestyle.com. It's where we teach my Drop Ship Lifestyle business method of, obviously, drop shipping and how to leverage domestic suppliers and high-quality traffic. But this particular person that I was communicating with has been part of that program for years and years and years, probably three years or more. They run a very successful business based off the Drop Ship Lifestyle model.

Now, they have been talking to me throughout the years, hinting on the fact that they want to start introducing their own brand of products. Basically, they want to private label their own stuff. They want to be able to add their brand into the mix of products that they're already offering and already selling. If you follow anything of what I've said over the past however many years I've been doing this, I don't know, five or six, then you know I think that that is a great idea. This person, though, even though they agree and they want to do it, they haven't pulled the trigger yet.

Finally, I just asked. I'm like, "Listen, you've come to me with this so many times, why hasn't it materialized yet? Why isn't this actually a thing that people can go to your website and buy?" What it comes down to is fear of risk. Right? The risk of putting money into this venture, trying something new, and then having it not work out. Okay, this is what the person basically told me. They don't want to do the work if it's not going to get them the results that they hope for. They don't to put in the money. They don't want to put in the time only to basically have a business that kicks off less net profit while doing more work.

I get that. Totally legitimate, totally valid. But here's the thing. There are ways to know if doing this is going to work before you actually put in all that money or all that time. This applies to whether you're trying to add in maybe importing your own products to your website, whether you're trying to add in private labeling, even if you're trying to add in lower ticket items or some type of related product or service. It could be a membership community. It could be educational videos. It could be if you want to sell merch, T-shirts and stuff. There's ways to do it without having to really put in tons of money and ton of time and then seeing if it's going to make sense to go ahead and actually make that investment.

Here was basically a summary of my response to them and what I would recommend you do as well if you're already running a business that's profitable and you want to add in additional revenue streams kind of while testing the waters before you ... I would say, before you go all in and build yourself more work than it's worth. The way that we do this in our businesses and the way that we're currently working through this right now with a new one of our eCommerce stores is ... I'll give you a generic example. I won't tell you exactly what I'm doing with mine but I'll give you a generic example.

Let's just say that my store was selling barbecue grills and meat smokers, things like that, big thousand-dollar-plus pieces of, basically, cooking equipment that people put in their backyards and hang out with their buddies and make ridiculous food. Okay. If that was the thing I sold, then as the store owner I might think, "You know what? These things are selling great. I'm making a bunch of money. Maybe I want to add in a different ... Let's just say subscription boxes of food. These people are buying these grills from me, maybe I can also offer them a box of steaks that arrives every month, a box of grass-fed pork, what ever it is. Right? Different things like that that my audience would probably be interesting in.

Well, one way to do that would be to go out there, to find a farm that actually produces these meats, to negotiate with them, to figure out all the labeling, to figuring out the shipping and the logistics and all of that. Then eventually, however long down the line, once this is all figured out, launch that on my website and hope my customers buy it. Then, after they buy it, hope that the product is actually quality, hope that it arrives at the customers homes and is not defrosted and just disgusting and bad, and hope that the customers are happy with it. Right? Basically do it the hard way.

Again, this isn't what I'm doing or what this person I'm communicating with is doing. But if that was something that they wanted to do or if that was something you wanted to do, I would say, "Listen, I think that's a great idea. I love the fact that you want to add recurring into your business. I love the fact that the prices are still going to be relatively high-priced, and that this is something that if it's good quality people would order forever. What I would recommend you do is go out on Google and look for other companies that are already offering this service, like grass-fed whatever, grass-fed farm beef and chicken and poultry, whatever, delivery. Then, what I would recommend you do is see which ones have an affiliate program. Basically, which ones can you refer customers to and then earn a commission from?"

Let's just say you went out there and you identified the top three companies that do subscription box meats. Okay? Find them, find which ones have affiliate programs. Order from all three of them and see which one you like the best. Which one had the best service? Which one has the best meat? Which one just seems like the best value? Right? Boom. Now, how long has that taken you? Not much time at all. You went on Google, looked up some website reviews, ordered some food, cooked some steaks with your friends. All good. After that, what you're going to do is choose the one that, again, you think is the best product, the one you would actually want to sell to your customers, and then you're going to start promoting it on your website.

You're going to promote it as an affiliate. You can add a section to your website, maybe put a banner in your sidebar, maybe add a link to your header menu that says something like whatever it is, grass-fed meat. Okay? People go there. They order. Now, already, just by, again, not much work, all you did was order some stuff, try it out, add a few links to your website. Now, within a few days later you're seeing which items people are buying through your affiliate account. You're seeing how much money they're spending. You're seeing the frequency at which they buy. Now, you're making money as you're doing it.

Let's just say a few months go by with all this set up. Again, at this point, your time involved has been almost non-existent, maybe a few hours max while you're making money, while you're seeing if these things even have potential for your audience. You'll know that because, again, you're making money from it or you're not. If you are and you still want to go the route of having your own brand, that way the recurring aspect is really built into your business, and that way you basically just have another arm of revenue that has high profits instead of just being an affiliate, then what I would recommend you do is reach out to this company whose stuff you're selling that you already have a relationship with because you've been bringing them sales, this subscription box company.

You say, "Hey, you've probably seen that we've been selling X amount of units for you over the last few months. We're ... of developing our own ... box. We know you guys have great products. Our customers are loving it. We're loving it. We would love to work out some kind of deal with you where you can be our packer and where you could be our supplier. Now, from there, the conversation which way it goes is really up to you. This is a podcast so I'm not going to get into what I would say and the whole back and forth and negotiations of how this might work. But if they do want to do business with you and if this is a service they can offer and if you pitch it the right way, then the beauty of this is you can now switch out on your website the fact that you promote X, Y and Z's meat company to you are promoting your own.

Basically, now the customers are yours and the more beauty of this is at this point, you didn't have to go out there and do research on all these different farms that produce all these different types of cattle and steaks and pork and all of that. Because, again, you just found one company you've been working with. You don't have to find out who can private-label it and how to ship it and how to keep it cold. You basically cut out all of that research. Now, if you have the relationship you have that arm of your business being run by a professional who you already hf a relationship with because you've been bringing them sales and who you know has a good product because you've been receiving it and your customers have been receiving it. Boom, then you're just ... You're good. You're basically good to go with a whole nother arm of of your business with the best stuff, with the best pricing, without causing yourself a headache and without putting in work and not knowing if it's going to pay off or not.

This is definitely a topic I can go a lot deeper on. Again, I'm not going to do it on the podcast because, well, for one, I'm at the office already and I got to get to work and do these things for myself. But if anybody is interested in maybe doing this in your business or diving deeper, we are going to start doing basically MasterMinds Meetups for eCommerce Lifestyle where we bring together somewhere between 10 and 30 different eCommerce entrepreneurs all working on the same thing. These meetups will be either in Austin, Texas or somewhere in the other side of the world. We're not doing this yet but if you are interested in being part of that ... It's not free, obviously, because it's for people that are making money and we're going to be sharing really inside with our numbers and our results and kind of what we're doing exactly.

If you're interested in that, just go to eCommerceLifestyle.com and keep an eye on it because more information will be available there shortly. That's all, guys. I'm going to head in and get to work. Hope you all have a great Monday, great rest of the week. I will talk to you all in the next episode of eCommerce Lifestyle. See you.